Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM The Nation Professor Eric Alterman apprises the gloomy readers of this venerable wail sheet of an astonishing rebirth in American culture. Glad Tidings! Good News! Now that the...
...Now that the Constitution has been rescued and sexual McCarthyism discredited, perhaps the most durable legacy of the Lewinsky mess is the central location of the right-wing slime machine on the American political landscape...
...Thurgood Marshall [the first black Supreme Court justice] was who we wanted to be...
...When I was growing up, we didn't aspire to be sports stars," Gates says...
...I did it in my little way and people like Shakespeare did it far more profoundly...
...We should have believed from the start that he was cheating on her...
...Good, so far...
...JOE KLEIN: Well, you know, watching Barbara's interview tonight I was kind of struck by the fact that the private lives of great public figures has been the stuff of fiction forever...
...I think one of the things I took from your interview with Monica, Barbara, was that the President is not deficient in the love zone [italics, ours...
...And when great artists do it, it can be uplifting and entertaining and even transcend it...
...It sends the message that the police can't screw around with black people...
...she asked, with just enough of an edge to let me know that my outraged reaction to the verdict had been noted...
...It was a gentle reproach, a reminder to be humble in my judgments...
...It is people such as Mr...
...The coffin is 99 percent straw and contains no wood...
...But Betty, what kind of a message does it send to let a murderer go free...
...What many people are realizing is that if there are breakdowns in the infrastructure of the modern world, the seeds that have been planted by all these movements are likely to see exponential growth...
...We should believe everything...
...You don't get one without the other...
...One error was not taking fascism seriously, and another was not uniting with a segment of the ruling class to defeat these fascist forces...
...A common response among this group is, "This is what I came here for," or "I've been waiting my entire life for this...
...She took her cue from "the errors of the Communist forces in Weimar Germany...
...So, she exposes her thong panties to him, by her own admission, very soon after she gained audience with him...
...It should be Vernon Jordan, not Michael Jordan...
...And I think that, you know, a hundred years from now this period is going to be remembered kind of the way we look back on Salem [italics, ours...
...But when we see it done in reality, as we've seen it done tonight, it's just kind of embarrassing and tawdry and it diminishes all of us...
...In fact, Theodore Roosevelt doesn't belong there either...
...Why are raccoons invading our yards...
...FEBRUARY 6, 1999] Nightline Apres the Monica interview, Barbara Walters and Ted Koppel chat with Joe Klein, the male equivalent of that Valley Girl...
...As I returned to my office, I wondered about her...
...They immediately see the systemic implications of the issue, and use their carefully developed prototype projects as seed examples of how we can meet some of the real human needs in this new situation...
...According to BioFab's website, some people like to buy them in advance...
...TATIANA MITCHELL Seaside [DECEMBER 6,1998] Washington Times On the correspondence page of the Good Times, the dark side of the First Amendment exposed by another of the selfless patriots cracking the whip over our government bureaucracy: I am writing in response to James Bovard's recent article discussing government partnerships between labor and management ("Revolt in the bureaucratic ranks," Commentary, Feb...
...He's a guy who needs love from everybody and all the time...
...And throughout history...
...And at the time I think I wrote in New Yorker that we would be remembered, this would be remembered as a period more for the ferocity of its prosecutions than the severity of its crimes...
...Slaughter of the defenseless is not the answer...
...JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1999] Gainesville Sun Linda C. Wilson of Gainesville makes her second appearance in TAS's Current Wisdom section in the last year...
...Boy, it must have been painful for her to watch that scene, even if she loves the president, even if she's friends with us...
...The manufacturer markets the coffins over the internet and at retail stores in central California...
...Because we have deprived them of their habitat...
...We are appalled, mothers get a slap on their hand...
...Communism ultimately failed, thank God, but the firm American opposition to its tyranny was bipartisan, and started with Harry Truman...
...JOE KLEIN: Well, I find that it's a period of my life and our lives that I'm not yet nostalgic for...
...Salem...
...She was a serene presence...
...FEBRUARY 23, 1999] The American Spectator • May 1999 81...
...MARCH 15, 1999] Village Voice Slobodan Milosevic isn't the only Hitler out there: To many progs, the impeachment seemed like a clear and present danger—"a peaceful attempt to assassinate the president," in Steinem's words...
...FEBRUARY 10, 1999] San Francisco Chronicle From John Tomasin, sculptor in residence in West New York, New Jersey, the noblest artistic proposal of the late twentieth century: The proposal to place Ronald Reagan on the Mount Rushmore monument is simply ludicrous...
...You mean, what do they think in the 'hood...
...And we should believe that they love each other immensely...
...We should believe that they have a political partnership...
...Previously uninvolved members of the public will see them as practical solutions they can use in neighborhoods and communities to meet real-life needs...
...JOE KLEIN: Well, I mean it's clear that his behavior was reprehensible...
...MARCH 17-23,1999] Co-Op American Quarterly Death, where is thy sting...
...Witch hunts...
...Using well-developed dialoguing and visioning processes involving the entire community, people coulddevelop new ways to organize themselves with community-supported agriculture, barter and alternative currencies, solar and wind energy, holistic and complementary medicine, and co-ops of all kinds...
...There's strengths and there are weaknesses and they're marbleized...
...He begins to fool around and, and,...uh, the rest is history...
...SPRING 1999] Monterey County Herald The beginning of the Raccoon Rights Movement: We read almost every day about mothers abusing their children or killing their babies and stuffing them in garbage...
...Remember, George, when this started, I thought he was guilty and you didn't believe it...
...JOE KLEIN: Well, my feeling has always been that with regard to their marriage we should be indiscriminately credulous...
...MARCH 3, 1999] Utne Reader Proof that the clinically insane can be boring: Some are seeing the Y2K crisis as a social change opportunity...
...But let one child get the raccoon virus and thousands of poor beasts are slaughtered...
...But, you know, in writing Primary Colors I ultimately came to the conclusion that great politicians are like great steaks, there's muscle and there's fat...
...Bovard— senselessly vilifying government workers —who help plant seeds in the minds of sick people such as Timothy McVeigh, resulting in tragedies such as the Oklahoma City bombing, -BOBBY L. HARNAGE, SR...
...MARCH 15, 1999] Newsweek More soap opera within the Clinton White House, as sensitive George (Stephanopoulos) beholds serene Betty (Currie) upon the liberation of O.J...
...Love commune...
...An environmentalist bulletin brimming with good news despite melancholy events: The Way to Go—Straw Coffins BioFab of Redding, CA has begun marketing biodegradable coffins made from rice straw for the final resting place of the environmentally conscious...
...People who have been working their entire lives for political, social and cultural change immediately see its transformational potential...
...Bovard would have us move back in time to the outmoded, archaic top-down management theories developed in the 1890's rather than move government operations, through partnership, into the 21st century with a more flexible, creative and responsive work force able to meet the changing needs of the American people...
...I mean what would we have done covering Franklin Roosevelt's White House during WWII when he was running a love commune there [italics, ours...
...We should believe that they fight like cats and dogs...
...We had first worked together in the Dukakis campaign, then the War Room, now the White House...
...Most people feel vindicated by the verdict...
...Humans are breeding like flies and displacing wildlife more and more...
...Even a hardcore radical like Mary Lou Greenberg, who is also a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, felt compelled to defend a president who declared that "the age of big government is over...
...It's a great way to become one with the environment...
...What did Ronald Reagan ever do to rank with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln...
...They use the large boxes for storage, window seats, coffee tables, wine racks, book shelves, or you think of a use...
...Made from a compressed liner hoard with a straw core, strawboard is the same material used to make interior walls, pallets and furniture and is a low cost, nontoxic way of using waste fiber...
...As people realize they can mobilize their personal resources and contribute to community-preparedness efforts, they feel more confident and empowered that they can get through this Y2K crisis...
...Though Hitchens dismisses the idea that the campaign against Clinton was an attempted coup, it certainly seemed to many activists that his removal from office would have ushered in a period of right-wing dominance...
...The look on my face gave me away...
...Ashamed of my insensitivity, I went back to talk with her about it and asked if she could explain the cheers...
...Is she trying to compete with Anthony Lewis...
...Here she meticulously chronicles the origins of the Vast White-Ring Conspiracy: I see Bill Clinton in his office working and a very young, eager intern spotting him and developing a crush...
...Love zone...
...NATIONAL PRESIDENT AMERICAN FEDERATION OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES, AFL-CIO Washington [FEBRUARY 28, 1999] 80 May 1999 • The American Spectator Financial Times (London) Harvard's Henry Louis Gates on how it should be: Gates bemoans what he sees as the decline of intellectual ambition among American blacks...
...I see Monica trying a run at him, knowing she has already scored with married men that were older in the past...
...So Betty brought up a talk we'd had shortly after O.J...
...You know, it was the culmination of patterns that we saw in Bill Clinton for many years and also patterns that we saw in ourselves in the media and the country, zo years' worth of witch hunts [italics, ours] building up to this, these events...
...Simpson): Everyone returned to work, and Clinton retreated to the relative solitude of the Oval, leaving the office to Betty—the only African-American in the room...
...was arrested...
...What the heck, if you don't ask, you don't get, eh...
...We should remove his glasses and mustache and shape the head to look like Franklin D. Roosevelt, who does deserve to be there with the giants...
Vol. 32 • May 1999 • No. 5
